Ms Rose Mary McDonagh:

I do not know if I am an expert but the residential zoned land tax has been at our committee for the past year. We welcome the comments of the Taoiseach earlier. I will read the words he used because it sounds like we wrote them ourselves:

"It is reasonable for farmers to say, 'This is my farm. I own this land. It has been in my family for generations and I don't want to develop it. I want to continue to farm it.'"

That is exactly the point we have lobbied on for the past year. We have put a huge amount of work into it. At this stage we need a legislative change that will actually allow farmers to farm their land. There was previously an exemption in the vacant site levy so we need an exemption in the residential zoned land tax. Every time we make this point, politicians come back and the Government line seems to be that there has been a section built into it where the farmer can go in to de-zone or ask for the zoning to be changed. That is not happening on the ground and we have been told at council level that it is not working. We need legislative change that farmers would be exempt.

There is also another issue there in the sense that when the maps are drawn up all that is in the legislation is that the councils have to publish the maps. There is no onus on the council to notify landowners that they are in the scope of this tax or that they are caught up in it. As the Deputy rightly said, 3% of market value is penal because that is a lot more than the value or the income that has been received from farming. Notification needs to be sent to anybody who is caught up in this but the bottom line is that farms, farm land and farm families need to be exempt from this, similar to the vacant site levy.